‘Left-Handed Girl’ Review: Taipei’s Bright Lights, Dark Corners (Netflix)

I-Jing (Nina Ye) is five years old and naturally uses her left hand for everything — eating, writing, drawing. It’s never been an issue for her, her mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tasi), or her older sister I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma). But when the three return to Taipei after years living in a provincial town, the girl’s grandfather reacts badly. He insists her left hand is “guided by the Devil.” No one—least of all his wife—takes him seriously. But I-Jing does. She worries, she frets, and she resolves to stop using that hand. Or rather, she convinces herself it doesn’t belong to her at all and must, somehow, belong to Evil.

What initially seems like a small detail becomes a thread running through the major events that await this family of three as they settle back into urban Taipei—a city Tsou films with a loose, roving camera reminiscent of both her friend Sean Baker and the Wong Kar-wai of the 1990s. Born in Taiwan and based in the U.S., Tsou has long collaborated with Baker, and her film shares both stylistic and thematic echoes with his work, especially The Florida Project. Baker produced, co-wrote, and edited her feature. Still, Left-Handed Girl is unmistakably her own: part autobiographical memory-piece, part blend of urban impressionism and a more classical strain of Asian family melodrama.

The film follows its three leads almost in parallel. Shu-Fen, constantly tired and juggling too many issues, rents a small ramen-style food stall in a street market, but unexpected expenses tied to her past make paying the monthly fee difficult. I-Ann, perpetually irritated or annoyed at something, works as a betel-nut seller—one of those neon-lit kiosks where young women in sexy outfits sell stimulant nuts popular among truck drivers and delivery guys. Things take a complicated turn when she becomes involved with her boss. And then there’s I-Jing, sweet and self-contained, roaming the city while the adults around her barely notice. She’s mostly fine—until that creeping fear about her left hand begins to take over.

Rather than forming a neatly plotted narrative, these three strands sketch an impressionistic picture of a family just trying to get by in Taipei. Shu-Fen receives little help from her mother — whose own behavior is far from spotless — or from her siblings, even as the situation worsens. Gradually, unresolved troubles from the past float back into view. And then, in a turn more conventional than the film had suggested so far, everything collides at a family gathering where every hidden conflict and secret finally spills out, all of it shaped by a deeply ingrained misogynistic culture.

It’s here that the film seems to collide with itself. Tsou, who has been crafting something loose, restless, and modern, suddenly leans into a set of big emotional reveals more in line with old-school Asian melodrama. The tonal shift is jarring—almost as if we’ve slipped into another film entirely. The sequence runs no more than fifteen minutes, and it doesn’t undo what the film achieves up to that point, but it does feel like a missed opportunity. It may very well be the reason Netflix bought the movie—this kind of explosive family drama tends to travel—but it doesn’t quite belong to the world Tsou had so vividly built.

If you can avoid getting stuck in that swamp of traumatic revelations and public showdowns, what remains is a film with a raw, nervy documentary energy: brusque, direct characters; a charming but conflicted little girl; a gallery of urban types (the half-hustler stall owner, the competing vendors, the cranky grandfather, the mischievous grandmother); and a low-resolution, hyper-saturated image that captures the texture of those markets and backstreets with striking immediacy. That almost tangible sense of truth that slips into the frame is often more revealing than anything a screenplay can engineer.